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I’ve Been Here Before: Does the Psychedelic DMT Open a Door to Reality?
I’ve never been into psychedelics. As a university student starting in 1969, drugs were all around me. I never touched even marijuana until a few years ago, when I shared half a brownie with my wife, who was in agony with shingles. The idea of going on trips with powerful psychedelics seemed more risky than getting on an airplane in the age of Covid. But this recent post on Big Think caught my attention.
DMT, N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, is a powerful psychedelic drug that produces intense hallucinogenic effects. It has been used for centuries by indigenous tribes as a brew called ayahuasca. DMT is illegal, a remnant of the War on Drugs of the 1970s, but many psychedelics are now being recognized as therapeutic for a variety of mental health issues. Consequently, there has been a significant increase in legal, controlled studies of these banned substances. However, this report is not from one of those studies, rather it was done by researchers poring through ten years of Reddit posts to gather firsthand information from users of DMT. They looked at literally thousands of these self-reports and found something interesting in a number of them: a significant number of users said they experienced a strong sense of familiarity.
The post included these reports from DMT users:
